Apr
6
Buttery
Filed Under Uncategorized | 27 Comments
First, let me just acknowledge the awesomeness of the previous entry’s comment section. Everyone who treats a service employee badly should be made to read that list and write a 1603829596-word essay on each incident and why the customer was HORRIBLE and WRONG and deserving of intestinal TOILET SNAKING.
I don’t have any stories that even come close to some of yours, but in reminiscing about my golden years of Dealing with the Great Unwashed Public I randomly remembered this humiliating thing I had to do when I worked at a movie theater.
Before I finally got the revered ticket-selling job where all you do is sit in a glass booth all day, I worked many shifts in the concessions area where I sold popcorn and giant tubs of soda and other crap (including, dear god, hot dogs). We had these containers of hot yellow oil that you splurted on the popcorn if someone wanted “butter”. It wasn’t butter, of course, it was melted earwax or some shit, and so the manager came up with the brilliant idea of calling it buttery.
We ALL had to say “buttery”, as in “did you want buttery on that?”. If we said “butter” or “butter flavoring” we got in trouble, and so over and over I found myself saying “And did you want buttery?” to people who invariably looked at me as if I were missing my helper dog. “Do you mean butter?” they’d say, and I’d have to say “Well….no.”
My uniform included polyester pants, an ill-fitting vest, and a clip-on bow tie. Ah, good times.
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The house remodel marches on, and this week is a flurry of activity as progress is made on the plumbing and electrical work. Yesterday we made the exciting discovery that we had no hot water, and the color of the not-hot liquid coming from the taps was a rich, earthy shade of brown. This was especially fun at 2 AM when Riley decided he needed a bottle RIGHT THE HELL NOW and I ran around looking for a source of water that didn’t come out of a potentially contaminated faucet, Brita filter be damned.
Apparently the problem is all fixed now, but too late for me to wash my hair this morning, and thus I am my own private Exxon Valdez today. You’re welcome.
(I’m not really sure what to do with the boy when he wakes up and cries in the middle of the night, because it’s rare that he does it. On one hand, I don’t want to endorse the habit of plugging his snoot with a bottle whenever he bellows forth a midnight wolf-howl, on the other hand he usually sleeps through just fine, or wakes up and babbles for a while, then falls back asleep–so it seems like if he really starts complaining it’s for a good reason? Man, I don’t know. Just when I think he’s becoming somewhat predictable, he changes things up. There was this utterly strange and frustrating five-day stretch we had where he completely refused all solid food, would just start wailing the instant the spoon loomed into view, and then just as suddenly he was eating everything in sight again. What. The. Hell, kid.)
As part of the bathroom work, JB and I have tentatively decided to tile the shower ourselves. We visited a tile store in our neighborhood Bellevue last weekend, and although they had some beautiful products we were way out of our price range, as the woman who talked with us made abundantly clear.
“These are triple glazed,” she said, gesturing to a display of ceramic tile. “We’re talking forty.”
“Forty…?” I said.
She heaved a sigh. “Forty dollars a square foot.” The word “duh” hung unspoken in the air until JB and I slowly backed away, leaving her to attend to the customers who could actually afford to adorn their shower walls with squares of sun-dried black tar heroin.
We went to “Tile For Less” next, where we found tile for $3 a foot. And there was a Krispy Kreme next door. Now that’s the sort of triple glazing I can appreciate.
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My boy, while I am sure you will put in your time at a stupid job or two, let us hope you are never asked to confuse the public with bad grammar and toxic popcorn grease.
Apr
4
In the face of adversity
Filed Under Uncategorized | 112 Comments
I was covering for a coworker today at work and answering sales email, and I got a message that contained, in part, the following:
Paying for software sucks when the vendor is THIS MUCH OF AN IDIOT!!!!!!!!!!!!
I quickly typed my response:
Dear Sir: That may be, but it’s also true that answering sales email sucks when the customer is THIS MUCH OF A JERK.
PS. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh, of course I didn’t. I was ridiculously pleasant and professional, although I did start out my email with the words “Whoah there”.
9.999 times out of 10 in customer service, when someone has worked themselves into an obnoxious state of being and you respond with politeness and a willingness to fix their problem, they instantly deflate. Usually they end up being apologetic and perfectly reasonable.
Why take the low road to begin with, though? Why do so many people vent their frustrations on people who had nothing to do with their bad day/month/life?
I really don’t get it. I’ve worked a number of jobs where I had to deal with the public and I have taken a heap of abuse (although on rare occasion it’s been deserved, like the time at a Kinko’s job when I accidentally laminated a FLY onto someone’s antique map they got in Europe), so maybe I’m extra sympathetic, but I don’t think it takes the experience of having someone yell directly in your face about how they ordered it WITH CHEESE, JESUS FUCK, in order to understand that it’s just not right to treat people with a complete lack of respect. I mean, I think it just takes common sense.
Years ago I worked at a small video store where part of my job was to call the “late list”. The late list was a dot-matrix printout generated by our computers each day that listed all the late rentals and the customer who had them. I hated calling the late list more than anything else at that job–I’m including the time a small child barfed an entire Pizza Hut onto the carpet and I had to clean it with a broom and a box of Kleenex–because people were so incredibly defensive and rude. Admittedly it’s intrusive to get a call at home about your copy of “Weekend at Bernie’s” but people would lose their damn minds. They would deliver an impassioned speech at top volume about how of COURSE it wasn’t late THEY certainly didn’t have it and maybe I should check the fucking SHELVES, etc, and then five minutes later the video would come slithering through the drop box with a guilty thunk and a car would screech off.
Those same people would raise so much hell over a late fee I would literally feel a wash of dread come over me every time someone’s account had a fine associated with it. I’d clear my throat, tell them they had a fee, and take a step back to duck their flying spittle as they generally freaked the fuck out over $1.50. The patriarch types were always the loudest, bellowing about the injustice of it all while their family cowered beside them, and it went without saying that the late movie was always something like “Lusty Latina Lockup”.
Oh, and ONE time? A woman came storming in, accused me of not warning her that “Reservoir Dogs” wasn’t a child-friendly movie (I am not even kidding), and threw the tape (this was back when dinosaurs roamed the land, the earth’s crust was still cooling, and movies came on VHS) directly at my head.
Anyway, I seem to have gone off down Unpleasant Memory Lane. My point is, why be a dick? No one is paid enough to take abuse from strangers.
Well, maybe certain 1-976 operators. But that’s it.
Okay, your task for the comments section: tell me your worst customer experience, a bad-behavior situation that you can laugh at now but was a nightmare at the time. Ready, go!
(ETA: Oh my GOD your stories are killing me. Man, we’ve all been in the shit.)
:::
(Dog always treats everyone equally. EQUALLY DELICIOUS THAT IS.)
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